Linguist-Educator Exchange

I Saw the Sign

Some days, I don’t do much other than teach. On days when I have 3 or 4 online classes scheduled, the in-between times often feel unproductive. These times include necessities like eating or homeschooling or hanging up the wash, but they also include things like doodling, posting on Facebook, or getting aimlessly lost in the Online Etymology Dictionary for a bit. Most days, I just don’t have it in me to squeeze two hours of tax prep or grading exams in between online lectures about strong verbs and syllable structure.

Anyone who’s taken a LEXinar can probably imagine that my brain needs a break before I start another one.

One Tuesday in March was exactly this kind of day. I began my day at 8am with an online course, followed by another at 3:30, and another at 6pm. The hours between 9 and 3 should have been really productive. I should’ve been able to do at least two hours of writing, or putting together a crockpot meal, or processing and uploading videos. But I didn’t. I exercised, and then I sat. A lot. I read fluff, quite a bit. I felt guilty, too. That takes energy.

What I didn’t realize until later that day was that my brain was hard at work on something, but not in the foreground. I didn’t know I was working until I was basically done. Right around 3pm, as I was prepping for my Spelling & Glamour LEXinar at 3:30, I had an epiphany about something our orthographic community has been puzzling about for quite some time. I quickly opened my Zoom room, and sent out an invitation for friends in France, Canada, and San Francisco to join me for a few minutes if they could. Much to my delight, France joined me right away from his dinner table. Much to my surprise, Canada was actually in San Francisco that day, so the two of them joined me from the same screen. Also in the room with San Fran and Can was a gaggle of teachers with whom they had been working.

So I set about explaining, quickly, what I had been thinking about. It had been a long time in the making, but it really began to crystallize the day before, in the final installment of a Syllables LEXinar with a really great group of orthographic thinkers. Here’s a screen-shot of what I sketched out as I explained my thinking to this crew:

This screenshot captures our conversation about etymological markers, the nature of the English phoneme, allophones, zero allophones, digraphs, and graphemes that are etymologically driven. That’s a lot for one short talk!

What I realized after six hours of feeling guilty and unproductive is that my brain needs that time off. It needs — I need — time to think unhurriedly, not on a deadline, to relax. That’s when I do my best problem-solving. Sometimes, time isn’t supposed to be productive; it’s supposed to be generative instead.

After my lazy afternoon, my conversation with France, Canada, and San Francisco exploded into clarity and rigor. A new line of investigation into etymological markers was laid out. Since then, additional conversations have brought depth and understanding to our study of syllables, phonemes, our orthographic concept model, and so much more. Recently, I realized that an understanding of etymological markers (a future LEXinar, to be sure) and an understanding of syllables in English both hinge on an understanding of the zero allophone.

So, in studying one lazy day, I saw the sign. I saw the significant value of time off for my brain. Because of this, I made a decision to take the month of April off from LEXinars, to regroup and think and write and figure out what was emerging as really meaningful in my study. Now that it’s May 1st, I’m announcing a new set of LEXinars that have grown organically out of this month off:

✦ The International Phonetic Alphabet

✦ The Nature of the Phoneme

✦ The Zero Allophone

✦ An Introduction to Structured Word Inquiry

These LEXinars address the “What About Phonology?” question I wrote about here. They reexamine phonology and how it’s written down, and they question the value of an accurate understanding. Quite a few people have inquired about LEXinars — these new ones, and the favorites like Old English for Orthographers or Syllables: Fact and Fiction. In order to know whose schedules I need to accommodate, I’m asking folks to register (preferably online) first, and then we’ll schedule courses in May, June and July. More information is available here.

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3 Responses

As the “Canada” that was in “San Francisco” I can concur that the explosion of new thought — visibly captured on your screen shot — was a pretty exciting experience. It was as though that guilt-inducing leisure time allowed Gina to notice that pebble in her shoe again that had long been there bugging her, but often got buried in the busyness of the day. Taking a pause from the hurry presented the opportunity for the time to take off that damn shoe and take a closer look at that little concept about the etymological markers that had been poking out to seek your attention. All of a sudden, with one almost absent-minded little poke at that pebble, all sorts of other understandings of orthographic concepts and spellings fell together in such a satisfying new order. Even ideas that hadn’t seemed out of alignment shifted into a more elegant position.

A week later I was having my own leisurely moment in a cafe in Melbourne with an amazing cappuccino. I was chatting about something seemingly unrelated with my friend and colleague Lyn Anderson. I was playing with a way we can consider the morphology and etymology of that old favourite word — FRIEND. Lyn and I address this word our workshops all the time and would do so again the next day. Suddenly the Zoom conversation with Gina came bursting up into the foreground for me. I had a first go at explaining some new frames for thinking about this word to Lyn. When we got back to our place we lucked out and caught Gina on Zoom back in Indiana. In that chat we discovered that the poking around in her shoe the other day had brought clarity to understanding in yet another aspect of the orthography system. To my our delight, by thinking about the nature of orthographic etymological markers and the concept of zero allophones in the context of the words FRIEND and SIGN we found yet another context in which morphology surfaces as the delimiting feature of orthography within which all other orthographic structures fit.

I love that it was these seemingly “simple” words — two words that featured prominently in my study of orthography since my introduction to real spelling — were still deepening my understanding of orthography 15 years later. Clearly there is no value in trying to hurry these things. I have no doubt that I’m not yet through finding rich lessons to learn about how English spelling works from just these two words. And there are a few more out there to study. I can’t wait to dive into any of them with Gina in her new LEXinars!

Thanks, Pete! I took my first phonetics/phonology course in 1989, and my first graduate courses in these subjects in 1991. It’s been more than half my life that I’ve been studying these subjects — and my entire adult life — yet my understanding continues to be shaped by my scholarship and the community I share it with.

In a grad phonology course I took a couple of years ago (2011? 2012?), I studied syllables, and that study has underpinned my current syllables LEXinar. It’s a study that is breaking new ground for folks in working with the writing system: Real Spelling has sent me a couple of films inspired by our collective study of the syllable, and several scholars are engaged in an ongoing conversation about the syllable. It’s exciting to be a part of the growth of scientific understanding of written English.